Reflections on my life as a Christian songwriter..."remembering into the future." - by Rory Cooney

Search This Blog

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Guest response to "Monetizing Religious Music", by David Ash

A couple of weeks ago I posted about "Monetizing Religious Music", a subject which interests a handful of people in the country, mostly my friends and colleagues who are composers or publishers of liturgical music. Our ministry and vocation is interwoven, like the publication of other necessary components of liturgy (scriptural translations and mass translations among them) in the legal and financial machinations of industry, and is swept along as well by changes in the recording and media distribution industries. Right now, for those of us who just write songs, it's a quagmire.

My colleague and jolly-good-fellow from the Seattle area, David Ash, (link to his amazon.com author page) wrote a response to my piece, and I include it here unedited because it is full of insight, wit, and passion. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I use it here with permission from the author. Be sure, if you haven't seen them, to check his Amazon page for his wonderful books of haiku for Catholics, coffee lovers, cat lovers, and other unsuspecting groups. The song he refers to in his essay is "Go Out and Tell the Good News," a little calypso-flavored setting of Psalm 117. You can hear an excerpt at OCP by clicking on the link.

Here is David's wonderful piece:
___________________

Response to "Monetizing Religious Music", by David Ash

Raphael (Tomas Milian): For what is an artist in this world
but a servant, a lackey for the rich and powerful? Before we even begin to
work, to feed this craving of ours, we must find a patron, a rich man of
affairs, or a merchant, or a prince or... a Pope. We must bow, fawn, kiss hands
to be able to do the things we must do or die.
[chuckles] We are harlots always
peddling beauty at the doorsteps of the mighty.

Michelangelo (Charlton Heston): If it comes to that, I won't
be an artist.

Raphael: [scoffs] You'll always be an artist. You have no
choice.

—The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)

So should I, as a songwriting
whore, work for pimp or pope? And, dare
I ask, what’s the difference? I got our
quarterly OCP royalty statement shortly before reading your blog on monetizing
religious music and it got me thinking.
I doubt that I’ll have a clear-cut answer, but at least I’ll raise some
more issues.

The system works
against us

Nearly the
same basic royalty structure exists for secular songs as for sacred: ten
percent of

David Ash

the retail price goes into a pool which is shared equally among the
number of copyrighted items and split evenly between text and tune. It seems fair. But there are extenuating circumstances and
exceptions for liturgical composers.

When you
write both lyrics and melody for a song on a twelve-tune CD selling for $12,
you get ten cents per album at full retail ($12 ÷ 12 songs x 10% = $0.10). But write both lyrics and melody for a song
in a 900-song hymnal selling for $15 and you get one sixth of a penny per copy
($0.0017). Laura and I have a psalm and
a canticle in Glory and Praise, Second
Edition. OCP has now sold more than
250,000 copies, a substantial number for a hymnal. Over the last 15 years, our total royalties
per song are less than $400 per song. If
you add in Journeysongs, Second Edition,
it becomes around $500 each. Compare
that to the paltry 4,386 copies of the octavo version of one of those songs
which have now earned us over $850 lifetime.
No wonder Taylor Swift makes more than we do for songwriting.

The royalty
rate is lower for hymnals that have Lectionary readings. NAB/RNAB translations are copyright material
too, so the pool has to be split even further.
And if the publisher likes your text but not your tune, or you set the
text to something in the public domain and the publisher doesn’t use your
arrangement, you lose half your income stream from the start.

Further,
OCP sells millions of missals each
year and their prices will probably increase over time. But the publishing contract sets a fixed
royalty per year if your song is included in the missals. It was $50/song/year 15 years ago. I don’t know what it is now, but even if it
has tripled to $150 for recent works, this is far less than a 10% royalty pool,
especially with the grandfathering.

And the
hymnal/missal system further penalizes established composers like you over
one-hit wonders like me as popularity and greater use is not rewarded. If an assembly sings your “Canticle of the
Turning” four times per year and our “Daniel 3: Glory and Praise For Ever” once
every three years, we each get paid the same on a per song basis. (Granted, license royalties are starting to
compensate for that.)

Lastly,
while sacred and secular markets share print and mechanical royalties, the
biggest discrepancy with the secular market is the total lack of performance
and broadcast rights. Christian radio
stations don’t play Catholic music.
Catholic radio stations won’t be paying us royalties when our music
isn’t ASCAP/BMI registered. And if a
rock band covers someone else’s song in a for-profit concert, they have to pay
for the rights. If a cathedral uses our
song at Mass, we get nothing. Once the
hymnal or sheet music is purchased, the income stops.

Fred
Moleck, a senior editor at GIA, was one of my professors at Santa Clara. I asked him back in the 1990s how many
liturgical composers were making more than $30,000 per year (a living wage then
equal to $50,000 now) in royalties from all publishers in all formats. Without hesitating, he said none. Even if you have a hundred songs in a hymnal
and millions of Catholics sing one of your songs on any given Sunday, your
decades of experience cannot earn you a full-time wage as a professional
liturgical composer. As Fred told me,
don’t give up your day job.

It’s not just the
system: it’s the market

As you
alluded in your blog article, Catholics generally don’t listen to liturgical
music outside of liturgy. But it goes
further than lamenting why 60 million potential customers in the U.S. don’t buy
our albums. Are the music directors of
20,000 parishes looking for new songs as much as they used to? Do the pastors hiring music directors view
hiring a composer as a plus? Can
composers test out new compositions in liturgy at their own churches without a
backlash? My experience says the answer
is increasingly no. Familiarity has
become the new watchword.

The cost to
the composer to reach the dwindling market is also increasing. Having gone the self-publishing route from
the beginning, our experience has been that you don’t sell an octavo unless you
first sold an album, and you don’t sell an album until they’ve heard the song
at a workshop or concert. That means you
have to pay your way to NPM, buy a booth, and do the dog-and-pony show on your
own against bigger competition. We’ve
given up on that. But even if you’re
with GIA and it has paid for the booths, you still have to be there to promote
your songs, and at least some of that cost will be born by you.

I used to
think that, at worst, composing music and self-producing albums was the loss
leader for the bigger “prize:” job security as a music director. Conversations with fellow Composers Forum
members and two years of fruitless interviews after my last Catholic directing
job ended in 2006 suggest otherwise (I’m about to become the new music director
at Grace Lutheran in Bellevue, WA). A
precious few have managed to translate their fame or skill as composers into a
main or side income by leading workshops.
But as for Fred Moleck’s “day job” comment, Masters degrees and
published works don’t necessarily translate into more hours or finding new work
faster. We’re not that different from
music directors who don’t compose: when the new pastor arrives, all bets are
off. So what is the return on
investment?

The biggest customer
is also the competition

One thing
that composers learned from the implementation of the 2011 translation of Roman Missal, Third Edition is that
music is not merely the servant of the liturgy.
Rather, music is liturgy’s bitch.

Imagine if
Bernie Taupin could call up Sir Elton John and say, “You know all those lyrics
I’ve written for you over the last forty years?
Well, I’ve changed them. No, not
the revisions we’ve been talking about for a decade, different ones. You won’t be able to use the old stuff
anymore. I’ll give you a year to make
changes. If you want to tinker with the
old melodies to fit new rhythms, fine.
If you want to invent new melodies all together, that’s your call. But I’ve ordered your publishers and record
labels not to sell anything that doesn’t have my new lyrics. Good luck.”

It couldn’t happen, of course, and
even if Bernie thought he had that kind of power and tried it, I’d like to
think Sir Elton would tell him to sod off.
But that’s what happened to composers of Mass settings, acclamations,
psalms, and canticles used in their proper liturgical place. Consubstantial changes meant a half-century of
repertoire had to be revised or thrown out.
The Church, de facto and de jure, is both the 800-lb. customer
demanding the new product and the lyricist entitled to half the royalties. Nice work if you can get it.

This new demand is a two-edged
sword. On the one hand, if half the
parishes in the U.S. think they can’t live without Marty Haugen’s Mass of Creation even if it has changed
and are willing to pay for lots of booklets for the choir, Marty may milk even
more revenue from an old product without (maybe) that much additional work (I
have no idea how much time Marty spent revising). Eventual purchases of new hymnals containing
new settings will eke out a bit more.
However, settings by lesser-known composers that are less than a decade
old will more probably get tossed aside.
Conscientious composers who tried to prepare for earlier ICEL revisions
they thought would be used had to start all over again or gave up.

While it may not happen often in
our composing lifetimes, this was a reminder that liturgical royalties are not
forever. The Church could do this again
any time for anything. Imagine Pope
Frances overriding the current translation in favor of the ICEL (we start all
over again) or reinstating permission for the old version to be used (a lá the
Tridentine Mass). Imagine approved
translations of old Latin hymns. Imagine
approved hymnals. The gorilla could stir
again, and we will have to make our tunes dance to its text, if we’re lucky.

It’s our own fault

The reason
none of us is looking to retire off royalties from church music is because it
isn’t possible now. But every time we
begin a sentence with “We’re not in it for the money, we’re in it because…” we
push back that day. People in power have
already put a period after the word money and have stopped listening. Pastors are hiring fewer full-time or
benefitted music directors and more liturgy directors for their parishes. Years of musical training are now worth less
to the Church than the “need” for glorified party planners. I don’t see the trend stopping anytime
soon. It won’t happen until enough
composers and music directors say, “I have no doubt you’ll find someone to fill
the position at that salary, Father. It
just won’t be me.” Or until, like
secular schoolteachers who aren’t in it for the money either, we unionize.

Our son is
a senior at NYU. His major is music
composition. He wants to be a film score
composer. In spite of his growing up
playing violin in our choirs and seeing that his parents have made a decent
living combining musical and non-musical jobs, I wouldn’t urge him to consider
a career in church music. In a world
where Catholics are more willing to pay (indirectly, of course) for the
commercial jingles they hear during Sunday football games than for the hymns
they hear (and maybe sing) during Sunday Mass, my advice to him is, “Forget the
Pope, find a pimp.” Hollywood is more
likely to value him than Holyrood.

“Raphael”
is partly correct. We may have no choice
but to be artists. We do, however, have
a choice over for what and for whom.
Laura and I recently wrote the music for a musical. We were basically commissioned, and we earned
more than twice our total royalties for the last 20 years. So I’ll close with a joke I heard back in the
1970s, when the dollar was worth a lot more: